Sin was a summer ghost, born of a death sudden as lightning. They slipped on bare ghost soles down the long corridors of an old inn deep in the forest, drifted and danced in the abandoned heft and dust-limned dim of the inn’s pillared halls. With ghost vision, Sin could see the many lanterns, persimmon and gold, that once illuminated the inn’s woodwork and polished floors, and the travelers and locals seated over honey wine and food.

These spirits of the inn’s long memory flickering through the abandoned spaces annoyed Sin at first, speaking of a kind of life they had never known. At the same time, the gauzy manifestations engaged them, like dreams on the ever-waking air of their ghostlife. One evening, they tried an experiment, sitting in the memory flicker of a patron, a large, thick-bellied man. Sin moved with him while taking a bite and the flavor of onion pancakes burst crisp-savory-sweet through them. The honey wine startled them, sting and tang, but its soft echo settled like fragrance on skin.

After that, Sin spent evenings slipping from one memory guest to another, tasting dishes the inn had been known for, getting drunk on honey wine and making up the flickers’ silent conversations.

“Let us eat all the food.”

“Yes, we are so rich and can have all the food.”

“Ah,” finger to the side of their nose, “and we will not share with grubby orphan children because we are piiiiiigs.”

When the inn’s remembering faded each evening, night came large and rustling in the woods around it. In the darkness, the memory of lanterns lingered, the inn wearing festive shimmer.

One night, some uncounted run of mornings, noons, and nights into Sin’s ghostlife, as summer passed into autumn, a cat squeezed into the inn through a crack in the walls, wild-eyed and rattled. Sin heard barking and snuffling on the other side of the wall, and drifted through to see three dogs, large and excited. They saw Sin, bayed and barked, then ran off.

Back inside, the cat heaved breath, eyes wide and round under one of the tables.

Sin hovered nearby, settling to sit, though still a handspan above the dusty floor. The cat watched them. His eyes were gold and caught the shine of memory lanterns. But he was not a ghost; Sin could feel his warm, wild solidity, the rank odor of dirty, dog-slobbered fur going through them as strongly as the smell of a roasted potato from a street cart had when they were alive.

Eventually the cat began to clean himself, the sound of rough tongue rasped over disheveled fur slipping into the night. Sin sat, hovering, the cat washed his fur clean of dog and fear, and the night ticked over until the cat curled up to sleep, Sin keeping watch. When dreams twitched the cat’s grey paws and made his whiskers tremble, running from dogs in the endless of his inner landscape, Sin drifted closer and lowered one hand to, then through, tongue-washed fur, into heat and intent, hunger and fascination with the tiny motions of the world. “You’re safe, you’re safe here,” they said, incanting it so with all their ghostly will.

In the early, still-dark morning, the cat stretched with thorough languor and slinked off to investigate all the corners and corridors of the inn. There were voles to eat, grasses in the inner courtyard to chew, water in the broken cistern, where birds came down to drink. Sin drifted after and when, as day crept on and sun furled into dust-soft air, the cat curled up on the rocks of the broken cistern, Sin stayed in the courtyard, twirling and singing, following memory guests passing through or sitting with them in the open doors of their rooms.

The season turned, rains poured through the courtyard, leaves in shades of flame and plum fell from trees and patterned the broken stones, leaving shadows behind when winds blew them dervish. Sin called the cat Hui and Hui followed them as much as they followed him. Hui played with the trailing tatters of Sin’s ghostl...